by Mueller, Tom
We descended the far side of the berm and walked into the groves between the village and the wall line. The trees were squat, healthy, thick-trunked, with reaching dark limbs that seemed blackened by the relentless sun. The prickly pear cacti and yellow fieldstone made me think of Puglia, until the muezzins of the area began the call to prayer.
Ever since the borders were closed to Palestinians, Aridah said, many people lost jobs they’d held in Israel, making the income from these trees all the more vital. “Without it, many young people can’t get an education. A number of men in their twenties and thirties aren’t able to marry, because they don’t have enough money to ask for the bride’s hand with pride. People can’t build homes. This seems to be the Israeli strategy: to destroy the society from below, to cut it at the roots. They are killing us, indirectly, through our trees.”
Aridah paused, as if sensing he’d gone too far. “Look, I have good relations with everyone. I have friends in Beit Aryeh and Ofarim, the nearest Jewish settlements, even though they were built on Aboud’s land, I talk with generals in the Israeli army, and with common soldiers—I respect them, and they respect me. Soldiers have orders, and I have to carry them out. We just want a basic level of justice and dignity.”
We walked past the last trees, into the trough cleared by the dozers. Aridah stopped in the churned, reddish marl, where there was no sign that anything had ever grown, and pulled out a stack of photos, creased and blurry, taken the day the Israelis came. He flipped through them, showing me how the bulldozers had advanced, with the Israeli army in the lead. How the soldiers in riot gear with assault rifles at the ready had formed a line, here where we now stood, and paid out a coil of razor wire. And how he and the villagers had knelt before them, and planted a tiny olive sapling in front of the soldiers’ steel-toed boots.
“We presented them with this peace offering, and said, ‘All we ask is that you give us what we need to live.’”
Aridah’s last photo showed the tiny tree, crushed under a solder’s boot.
“Soldiers have their orders,” he said, glaring at the image. “But I hope they didn’t include this.”
THE GREEKS EAT more oil than any other nationality, twenty-one liters per capita every year as compared with thirteen liters in Italy and Spain, one liter in Britain, and a little less than a liter in the United States. Among Greeks, the inhabitants of the island of Crete consume (and produce) the most oil. And among Cretans, the inhabitants of Kritsa, a village of 2,800 people in the southeastern part of the island, take the prize, eating about fifty liters per person per year. Kritsa can fairly claim to be a world capital of olive oil.
The king of Kritsa is Nikos Zachariádes, a pugnacious ex-policeman who returned to his native village after thirty years of service in the food fraud division in Athens, and threw himself body and soul into oil. Zachariádes is a fireplug of a man with a balding head, a pug nose, and slightly bulbous eyes that fixed me in a fierce glare, his forehead creased with concentration, when we met in Kritsa one bright January morning in 2011. For a moment, caught in that glare, I inadvertently pitied the food fraudsters who had run afoul of him in the past, and at the same time worried a little about his blood pressure. He asked me why I was interested in olive oil. As he listened to my answer, his worry beads clacking softly in his fingers, his brow smoothed, and his features relaxed into a knowing smile. And then Nikos Zachariádes gave me a resounding backslap, accepting me as one of the anointed.
For the next forty-eight hours, from early morning until very late in the night, he marched me with relentless kindness through the groves, mills, homes, offices, and workshops of Kritsa, and showed me the remarkably oleocentric lives these people lead. I met a few village notables—the mayor, the priest, the knife-maker, and the cobbler who still fashions traditional Cretan boots by hand with goatskins and wooden nails—but otherwise the town was empty, because the other villagers were out harvesting their olives. Everyone in town owns olive trees and makes oil; according to a local proverb, a person is truly poor only when “he doesn’t have a single olive tree to hang himself on.”
One of our first stops was at the modern mill of the Kritsa cooperative, where two big Alfa Laval centrifuges droned like twin jet engines. I watched farmers deliver hemp sacks of olives in trucks, utility vehicles, and on muleback. Each farmer dumped his fruit onto a large scale, collected a slip of paper with its weight, and departed, long before the oil was made—a radical difference from other communal mills I’d visited, where producers watched every stage of the oil-making process intently, and only left with their oil in hand. Zachariádes explained that, at his prompting, all of the 1,000 producers in the cooperative had agreed to make their oil collectively, treating the village lands as one big grove. “We all share the same beliefs about making excellent oil—grow good olives, process them quickly. Using this system, we can finish the day’s deliveries by dinner, and minimize the time that the olives sit around before they’re crushed.” Farmers in neighboring cooperatives, by contrast, make their oil individually, and routinely wait in line at the mill until long past midnight. Kritsa’s common pressing system not only makes better oil, but makes it in quantities that are ten, twenty, even fifty times greater than most Greek cooperatives, allowing them to sell to larger clients like supermarket chains.
Zachariádes instituted this revolutionary system, and made other important changes in the oil-making procedure, after he returned to Kritsa from Athens in 2006 and became president of the village cooperative. Six months later, Kritsa’s oil won a bronze medal at the prestigious Mario Solinas Awards, the yearly contest sponsored by the International Olive Council. In 2008, Kritsa’s oil won the gold medal at the same competition. Soon after, Zachariádes took another bold step by forming an alliance with Gaea, a private producer of high-quality olive oil and other Greek specialty foods, headed by prominent Greek businessman Aris Kefalogiannis. “Our partnership was an unprecedented move for Greek agricultural cooperatives, which are typically very political entities and regard private companies with suspicion,” Kefalogiannis explains. “Here’s yet another way that Nikos Zachariádes showed his innovative business sense, as well as his courage.” Thanks to this partnership, Kritsa is able to sell its oil in the UK, Finland, Lithuania, and other distant places, finding wider and more profitable markets than other Greek cooperatives can on the domestic market, and to send a larger slice of earnings directly to the olive growers. At a time of crisis in the Greek economy, with oil prices at historic lows and many growers abandoning their trees, the farmers of Kritsa are earning 25–30 percent more for their oil than farmers in neighboring villages.
After touring the mill, we ate an impromptu meal on the mill floor, passing around plates of fresh-picked stamnagathi, a wild green something like spinach, and crusts of whole-wheat bread called latherà, over which Zachariádes gushed streams of tart, peppery oil made from local koroneiki olives, using a modified gas pump connected to one of the centrifuges. Nothing can prepare you for the amount of oil that the people of Kritsa eat, or the countless ways that oil and olives enter their daily lives. During my visit I thought often of Ancel Keys, a Minnesota epidemiologist and biochemist who in the 1950s laid the foundations of what is now called the Mediterranean diet, while studying the link between traditional diets and heart disease on Crete, in southern Italy, and elsewhere. Keys and his colleagues were impressed by the quantities of oil consumed on this island: “It was incredible to see an old farmer start the day by knocking back a jigger of olive oil,” his close collaborator Henry Blackburn remembers. Experiences like this forced Keys to consider the potential health benefits of an olive-oil-rich regimen.
Every visit and house call I made during my time in Kritsa followed the same script: shortly after the introductions, my new host would pass around little shot glasses of raki, the potent local aquavit, and begin bringing plate after plate of local specialties cooked with, or swimming in, oil fresh from the village mill. In one corner of every kitchen
stood a tall pithari, a terra-cotta urn for oil with a capacity of 100 liters, and a muzuraki sat by the stove, a metal oil can which held about a liter of oil and was usually empty by the end of the meal. We ate raw artichokes, white radishes, lupins, and a dozen other Cretan vegetables I never learned names for, all glossy with oil. There were pita-shaped cheese breads cooked in puddles of oil in a special little frying pan, wild rabbit stewed in oil and rosemary, pastry pockets stuffed with goat cheese and deep-fried in oil, and little fish called barbugna oil-fried and eaten whole, heads and all. For dessert we had macaroons and sesame cookies sprinkled with chopped hazelnuts and honey, whose telltale green color revealed the quantities of olive oil they contained.
Greek Orthodoxy is no less steeped in oil. During a baptism in Kritsa, as elsewhere in Crete, the godfather smears the baby’s entire body with oil, which must according to religious custom be left on the child’s skin for three days after the ceremony before the parents can wash it away. At marriage, couples exchange olive crowns, and a bride’s dowry invariably contains holdings of olive trees. During funerals, after the deceased is lowered into the grave, the priest pours a cross of olive oil over the coffin, intoning, “You will sprinkle me with hyssop and I will be cleaned, you will wash me and I will become whiter than snow.” And at harvest time, many of the faithful bring bottles of their new oil to the church, to be blessed by the priest and used in a range of cures and rituals. As in classical times, olive oil is burned in church lamps, as well as in the lamps that illumine the icons in family homes and the images of the saints in roadside shrines. (During a storm at sea, some of the older villagers drip a few drops of oil from lamps that light the icons of Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors, which they believe will calm the waves.) Olive oil is considered an aphrodisiac; a local proverb, loosely translated, runs, “Eat olive oil to come at night, eat butter to sleep tight.” Following ancient, semisacred rituals, oil is used to avert the evil eye and even to read the future: people eagerly observe the shapes made by the oil floating on the surface of the water in the baptismal font, which reputedly foretell the character—and financial success—of the child.
Oil has always been central to life in these lands. Nikos Zachariádes took me to the ruins of Lato, a pre-Minoan fortress on a hilltop near Kritsa overlooking the Aegean, where we saw magnificent cyclopean stonework and the remains of large oil presses and cisterns. In Dreros, another nearby site dating from the early Iron Age, archaeologists have unearthed an inscription describing a rite of passage performed by all young men of the city, which required them to plant and tend an olive tree and to ensure that it grew healthy and tall. Clay tablets found an hour’s drive west of Kritsa, at Knossos, capital of a Minoan empire built largely on olive oil wealth, describe libations of oil that were offered to a range of deities during regular ceremonies; the frescoes, sculptures, and jewelry unearthed at the Minoan palace there are bushy with olive trees and studded with their fruit. Graves excavated near Kritsa, spanning the 3,000 years from pre-Minoan times to the present, routinely contain olive pits and oil containers among the bones, evidently considered vital provisions for the afterlife. A Roman-era grave found in the nearby town of Hagios Nikolaus, apparently belonging to an athlete, contained an aryballos to hold perfumed oil and a strigil to scrape it away after sports or bathing; a crown of golden olive leaves had been placed on the dead man’s brow, evidently to honor his sporting skill, which over the centuries the damp earth had pressed into the skull, forming a permanent, gleaming veneer on the bone.
Near the end of my stay in Kritsa, we visited a grove in the highlands east of town, where five members of the Zacharia family—a young man and woman in their late twenties, their parents in their fifties, and a grandmother approaching ninety who wore a black headscarf and green wellies—were bringing in their crop of teardrop-shaped koroneiki olives. The parents and their son used hydraulic wands with vibrating fingers to rake down the olives, which they gathered up in tarps and carried to the leafing table, a four-legged platform with a metal screen over it, where the young woman and her grandmother separated the fruit from the leaves and twigs.
As she worked in the late afternoon sunshine, Georgia Zacharia, the young woman, spoke to me in a calm voice. She said that she looks forward to the harvest each year, because it brings her family together. “And in the evenings I have no time or energy to think about my problems and my worries. I’m too exhausted.” She said that the olive harvest is a great comfort to her during the economic crisis that Greece is currently suffering. “Everyone has olive trees, a garden. Being self-sufficient is not that far away for us. Things are going to be all right.”
AT DAWNone morning in April 2010, workers from the agricultural cooperative Terre di Puglia, walking into an olive grove they were to prune that day in Mesagne, near Brindisi, discovered a pipe bomb at the foot of a tree. This wasn’t the first warning. Several months before, someone had broken into one of their cars and scrawled a death threat on the dashboard. Scraps of paper had appeared in their mailboxes from time to time, bearing thinly veiled threats: “Whoever goes to work today will pay the price for everybody.” “Silence!” “Stop breaking our balls!” Arsonists had slipped into their lands by night and set groves, vineyards, and farm equipment alight.
A bomb was a new level of intimidation. “Of course, it wasn’t meant to kill anybody,” Alessandro Leo, president of Terre di Puglia, told me. “Like all the other messages we’ve received since we started cultivating these lands, it was put there to intimidate, to destabilize our cooperative.”
Leo looked hard at me for a moment, as if trying to see whether I believed him—or to decide what he himself believed about the incident. Then he laughed, high-pitched and merrily, and shook his head. “At least, that’s what I tell myself. After all, we know who these people are, what they’ve done in the past. We know they’re capable of anything.”
Leo and his colleagues at Terre di Puglia are cultivating lands that until recently belonged to the Sacra Corona Unita, the pugliese mafia. Their former owner, Cosimo Antonio Screti, known as Don Tonino, was a powerful member of the organization and greatly feared in the area. After Screti was convicted of crimes including drug trafficking and membership in a criminal organization, the Italian government confiscated much of his real estate holdings, including this grove, which investigators believe Screti bought with the proceeds of illegal activity, particularly the drug trade. In January 2008, the grove and several other vineyards and farmlands were given in usufruct to Terre di Puglia, a member of a nonprofit organization called Libera Terra (“Liberated Land”) which fights mafia infiltration throughout Italy and cultivates farmlands taken from the mob. The workers in the cooperative are socially disadvantaged, and include several recovering drug addicts; these former victims of the narcotics trade work to regain their dignity and autonomy through hard labor on this land, which was once bought with drug money by a noted mobster.
Trouble was, the mobster hadn’t left. After being released from prison for reasons of poor health, Don Tonino returned to his villa in the middle of the fields then being farmed by the cooperative. Neither he nor his former associates in the Sacra Corona Unita were pleased to see someone else harvesting olives and making oil on property they still considered to be theirs. “He walked around like he was still the boss here,” Leo remembers, “with the patronizing attitude and the arrogance that are typical of this kind of character.”
The year Terre di Puglia took over management of the lands, no farmers or laborers dared to work for them, despite chronic unemployment in the area. “People avoided us,” Leo remembers. Not owning a tractor, he and his coworkers had to call the Italian forest service to plough their lands before they could sow the first wheat crop.
Nevertheless, the inaugural harvest was a modest success. Using a rare local species of wheat which they’d tracked down among elderly farmers in the area, they baked traditional pugliese crispbreads called tarallini and friselle. They grew local fi
aschetto tomatoes, from which they made pasta sauces and sun-dried tomatoes. They pruned and tended the long-abandoned vines of the negroamaro grape varietal, which yielded an excellent red wine. And from their small grove of centuries-old olive trees, they made a few hundred bottles of oil.
As word of their work spread, local and national organizations lent a hand. Agronomists and enologists from Slow Food, the culinary and fair-trade NGO, began to advise them, and a few supermarkets, like COOP, a national chain, started selling their products. Libera Terra signed a collaborative agreement with a prominent institute of agronomy in nearby Ostuni, and with several local olive-growers and oil-makers. Finally, one by one, local farmhands began coming to work at the cooperative. “I never dreamed I’d set foot on Don Tonino’s lands one day,” one of them told Alessandro Leo. “Or see this soil, which was overgrown with brambles for so long, turn fertile again.”
For Leo, the first taste of the olio nuovo produced powerful emotions. “I thought about the unique story of injustice and justice it contained. I thought about the people who used to taste this oil, and about the people who can taste it now.”
Leo says the oil is emblematic of the kind of food Libera Terra grows. “Each of our products has a story to tell. We want to recover a sense of food as having not just material and commercial value, but a cultural value too. We do this by emphasizing the link between a particular food and the territorio, the landscape where it’s grown and always has been. These ancient olive trees, in particular, are symbols of this territorio. They’re a central part of this landscape, and have sustained its inhabitants for countless centuries. When you eat this oil, you’re not just eating something made from an anonymous tree in some industrial grove. You’re eating a food from one specific spot on the planet, with a unique history.”
